Today at the first annual FLDrupalCamp I presented a talk on searching Drupal, covering some gotchas, tips and how to best set up your site for both internal searching (searching when on your site) and external searching (someone searching via e.g. Google). This was knowledge built over my career as a web developer, but primarily during the past eight months working on SkiNet.com. The beginning of the talk covers some unexpected issues discovered during development of the site and builds from the knowledge I've gained since then. Enjoy.

Being only the third talk I've ever given at a user group meeting, and definitely being one I was most anxious over due to it having ~70 people in attendance (though I was in the smaller room which had maybe 25), I was quite pleased with how it went. There were some minor tidbits I missed, but I do plan on turning it into a more detailed series of articles (time permitting). One thing I was extremely pleased with was that the lead developer of Drupal 6's internal search engine, Doug Green, happened to attend and at the end during the Q&A he gave some further insight into the engine - thanks Doug!

I hope everyone enjoyed it, and if you happened to attend please leave some feedback so I can hope to improve the talk.

Update 6/25/09: I fixed the problem that was stopping this from being viewable, so enjoy.